Andrew Sullivan on Braving New Intellectual Journeys

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm here with Andrew Sullivan. Andrew needs no introduction, but it is worth noting he has a new book that just came out called Out on a Limb: Selected Writing, 1989 to 2021. And I would say if you would like one single all-purpose introduction to Andrew Sullivan, this is the book. Andrew, welcome.

Thank you, Tyler. I'm thrilled to be here. And I think that's correct. I mean, it is a good— the whole point of doing this book was to say, Okay, you hear all this stuff about me. Well, here it is. This is the actual bulk of the work, and I hope people dip in and out of it. It's not supposed to be a first page to last page read, but it, it's an attempt to sort of just clarify a little bit what I've been writing for the last 30 years. And it, I'm hoping to show that there is a consistency to it. Not entirely consistent, obviously, because I've changed and the world has changed, but also as a way to just show the history of the last 30 years. 'Cause the thing is arranged chronologically. So that's the idea of the book, to just give a good intro to my various obsessions, passions, beliefs, ideas, and arguments over the last 30 years.

Now, since I've nominated you as the most influential public intellectual of our generation, I would like to start with some questions about the Andrew Sullivan production function.

Okey-doke.

So let's go back in time. At some point you learn you are HIV/AIDS positive. How did that possible risk of premature death affect your productivity over the longer run? Because you have done an enormous amount, as is shown in the book.

Uh, it obviously didn't. In fact, it kind of propelled me to write more.

How so?

Well, for example, Virtually Normal, I probably— is a book I wrote in 1995, which was basically the first book laying out the arguments for overhauling the gay rights movement and making marriage equality and military service its central features I would not have written had I not realized I had, thought I had, maybe a few years to live. I decided that if I was going to die in my mid-30s, which is what everyone seemed to think would happen, even though they were a little optimistic about it at the time, but I wasn't, I wanted to leave something behind. And so I wanted to leave behind my best argument for this simple civil rights reform. And they allowed me to take leave at the New Republic in 1994. I was— I siroconverted in 1993. And in fact, the foreword of the book has a little date under it, which is the date of my siroconversion, so that I put in the book a clear sign of why I was doing that. In other words, I felt I didn't have much time left and I needed to do everything I could. And then also, I just also believed and felt that this was an enormous story, this extraordinary plague that devastated a small community, really, in the context of a very large community that really wasn't that affected, and how that changed a lot of people's minds and hearts, and how it was the thing that propelled us, in a way, to make the civil rights arguments of the next couple of decades. I don't believe that without AIDS we would have marriage equality today. I just don't.

So if we fast forward to today, let's say you were to learn that you had only 4 years left to live, but most of it in healthy mind and body, what is it you would do right now knowing that?

That's a really good question. The, the, the good news is that back when it happened to me before, I realized that I was doing the work I really wanted to be doing. It was very clarifying. Editing The New Republic. Right now, I, I love to do what I'm doing, but I will be honest and say I think I would take time to spend more time with my friends and my family. I would try and travel some more because I haven't really done enough of that, even though it's a little hard right now. I'd probably up my intake of mushrooms. I think I would try and gain some perspective on mortality, and I think I would become probably much more devout than I currently am. But these are suppositions. You kind of learn once you—

Why not become more devout now, right?

Because I'm a human being and death is the ultimate reminder of ultimate reality. And we can push that out of our heads all the time and carry on quite normally. But the prospect of dying really does concentrate not just the mind, but the soul. And you have to figure that out. And of course, I should feel those things now. I should, we all should. And that's the paradox of this. We know that there's a difference between a life of doing and a life of being. And sometimes because our default mode network kicks in, as it were, we spend much too much time doing things than being something. And so that's the paradox. I know there were moments in my life when presented with mortality, I got a very crisper sense of God, of my own life and the universe. And then over time, you just get caught up in the mundane and the everyday and the frustrations, and you lose that perspective.

Now, you've taken quite a few intellectual risks in your career. If you look at our intellectuals and public intellectuals as a whole, what do you think is the most fundamental reason why they lack courage?

God, these are good questions, Tyler. I think I've been struck over the last few years specifically at how many journalists especially, or public intellectuals, are very much members of their own class and are extremely concerned, perhaps more than ever, what their own peers think about them. And so are actually very, very vulnerable to social pressure. And I think That means you don't want to take risks if you want to have a good career in intellectual journalism. You don't want to alienate your peers. And increasingly, your peers are all taken from a pretty narrow socioeconomic base who hold very similar opinions. And that's become truer over the last 20 years. And so the, the career and psychological and social costs of going, quote unquote, out on a limb are quite considerable. And I think I am lucky to some extent, I mean, to have a life that's really not socializing with all those peers. My friends are a very eclectic bunch of people and almost none of them is— I mean, a few of them are, but a lot of them are not in journalism or in public intellectual life at all.

What accounts for that? What variable in you, in them, has led that to be the equilibrium?

Well, part of it has been gay, because you inevitably develop a social network that is independent of your professional network, because that's how you socialize in many ways. And from that, you, you generate a different kind of perspective. And also, I just, I don't know, I just, I just get bored and irritated by my peers. And I, I'd much rather listen and talk to someone from a completely different perspective. My best friend plays jazz piano, for example, and we talk about everything. We talk about politics, but he comes from a place where if I can sit down with him and say, what do you think about this? You haven't processed this immeasurably, but what do you think? And most ordinary people outside of that circle will ask all sorts of very straightforward questions that my peers haven't even thought about and will see things from a different perspective. I also think the fact that I come from basically a non-college-educated family, so that I grew up with people who didn't have those esoteric or those academic skills, and certainly not the social skills to belong in the upper middle classes.

Same with me, I might add.

Well, and so you get used to real conversations about people, and you don't mistake credentials for intelligence. And you realize that people outside of this system may be more perceptive about what's going wrong with it than people buried within it. And so I just, I honestly find life more interesting the more variety of people you get to know and meet. And that means from all sorts of different ways of life. And the good thing about being gay, I will tell you, is that that happens more often than if you're straight. Because it's a great equalizer., and you are more likely to come across someone who really is from a totally different socioeconomic group than you are through sexual and romantic attraction, and indeed the existence of this sort of subterranean world that is taken from every other particular class and structure, than you would if you just grew up in a straight world where you didn't have to question these things, and when your social life was bound up with your work or with your professional peers. So the idea for me of dating someone in my office would be absolutely bizarre. For example, I, I can't believe all these straight people that just look around them and say, oh, let's get married. Whereas gay people have this like immense social system that, that can throw up anybody in from any way of life into your social circle.

So your non-gay friends, you think, are in some ways more conformist than your gay friends, issues of sex aside, right? There's a sense in which Simply by being—

Yeah, well, simply, I think, no, because my non-gay friends, I mean, it's also true that my non-gay friends who are not part of the elite are also similar to that. Um, they have just different perspective. But yes, I find them to be often more questioning, more curious, and more capable of asking basic questions and not taking things for granted than many of my peers, which makes them better, which is why I think journalists were better off coming from ordinary people, like working-class journalists who knew people, knew reality, weren't caught up in ideology or orthodoxy or have any interest in their social peers and were just interested in getting to a story or breaking a story or finding something out regardless of the consequences. That's the kind of journalism I kind of like. And finding a way to make yourself popular among certain elites is just not something I ever wanted to do. And I'll tell you this, I'm also just not that big a socializing person. I tend to have friends that are very individual, one-on-one. I tend to hang out with small groups of people. I don't have parties. I don't go to parties. I'm just not a clubbable person. I've never easily fit in to any institution that I belong to, and that's just my personality, I think.

Putting aside issues of sex, but how do your conversations with your gay friends differ from those with your non-gay friends?

We are more candid with each other, I think. We're certainly more candid about affairs of the heart, there's a, a frankness and rudeness and sense of humor that is hard to explain outside of its particular context. But I don't want to give you the impression that my non-gay friends are somehow in some boring category. They're not at all. I'm talking more about my straight peers within my profession rather than my regular non-gay friends in real life.

So taking a hetero person such as myself, if I want more of this element at the margin that you have with your gay friends, what's the needed input to produce that?

I think it's going to places you wouldn't otherwise go, meeting people who are new, finding a way outside your own circle of friends, your own socioeconomic status. One thing I was talking to Charles Murray about actually was how he does this poker game that he plays with just regular folks. In a casino, and it's a regular thing he does. None of them are from his way of life, but it's a great way to get in touch with how people genuinely feel outside of the chattering classes. And I think that's the gain. I'm not helping you very much here, am I, with the, the thing? I mean, I don't want to give the impression gay people are somehow more fun, or— I'm just saying you're more likely to randomly come across someone who's not part of your scene or your class or your race for that matter, as a gay person, simply because as a gay man, especially the, the sexual and social dynamics are utterly independent of professional, intellectual, or ideological dynamics. And so essentially you, you become friends with someone because you've seen them a lot at a gym or at a bar or at a restaurant. And, and it just becomes that. It doesn't become, what did you do? What do you do? How do you make a living? And so on and so forth.

You mentioned before mushrooms. How do you think that self-medication, whether it be mushrooms, marijuana, testosterone, something else, influences the actual content of your ideas?

Of course it influences them.

I would—

here's, here, lemme gimme an example. I'm a daily weed smoker. I have been since I was 36. I was kind of a late bloomer on this.. And for me, what that does, I never, I never work under the influence of any substance. So I, this is always outside of the work hours. I'm not crazy and I don't really drink anything. So weed will happen at the end of the day. And what I find that marijuana does, and to some extent mushrooms definitely do, meditation does as well, is that they suppress the ego. They weaken. The ego. And so if you write something, as I often do, and finish it, or a first draft, and then smoke something and then go and take a walk and just let my ego disappear a little bit and let me look at what I've personally done as if I were looking at something someone else had done with that same kind of dispassion, and then you're like, I got that wrong, or why did I miss that, or that's stupid, or maybe if I turned the thing around, you just how you're less attached to your own pride and your mind is sort of taken out of its normal rut.

So you change your mind more?

Yes, yes. Also true with something like MDMA. I remember, for example, writing Virtually Normal, which was this very tightly argued cerebral book. And then after I'd finished the gut of it, I went to celebrate with some friends. We went out dancing. I did some MDMA. And we— and in the middle of a Dance Floor, I was like, you know what? I haven't put in this book at all why I care about this subject, why it matters to me. I'm being too abstract here. So that's when I went back and then I wrote the introduction and then the epilogue, which were much more less intellectual and more experiential. They're the most popular parts of the book. Or you allow yourself to realize you might have made a mistake. You might have made just simply a factual error, which, which happens to everybody, and you kind of wake up in the middle of night, or you just realized maybe that judgment you became too attached to because you were too proud to let go of it. And taking a moment to take your pride out of it and take your ego out of it gives you some possibility after hours of, of reassessing your work. And also the thing that happened with blogging was that because you are constantly writing, you had to constantly account for changes in mood, in, in argument, and in your opinions. And because it charts you day by day, hour by hour. So that was another thing that got me to shift my opinions. The testosterone, I think, does give you a certain amount of energy, and I have to be careful because it's every 2 weeks. It's only 1 cc. It's not like a massive amount, but the next 2 days I have to be careful I don't pop off on something. And it's funny, my colleague Chris Bodenow used to tell when I'd just taken a shot because somehow I'd just fire off this incredibly passionate rant or something. So I have to be aware of that too. But, you know, we are a function of everything. I could just as well say that eating, as I used to, sugar and cookies all morning as I wrote The Dish gave me this kind of wiry focus. But we're all a mix of chemicals.

What kind of mental process do you use to try to decide if a new idea you have is just the result of bias from substances, or do you just think, well, some of them will be biased, but it's more important to innovate, so I'm going to double down on this? How do those thoughts go?

I literally have a little book called High Ideas, which is ideas I've had when I'm high, and I write them down. By certainly then, I, then I make sure I look at them totally sober. And I would say about 3/4 of them are nuts and I throw them out.

This is the book we want you to publish in your last 4 years.

Good ideas. Things I can't really say or think about, but I, I just let my mind wander and, you know, I'm just a curious person. I love thinking about stuff and I think my mind can go down a rabbit hole. This was part of the problem with me for a long time. I just, I couldn't— I had terrible insomnia until I found cannabis in my late 30s. Some of us have brains or minds that just won't stop, and it can be an ordeal. And so it's not for lack of— I'm not gonna not think while I'm on weed, or even when I'm on MDMA. I find, for example, on MDA mushrooms, it's all theology for me. It's all about God. It's all about the relationship between the Trinity. I mean, the the possibility of the incarnation. These things are what I become obsessed with when I'm really on mushrooms or MDMA or the hallucinants. Yes, it becomes all about Christianity in a weird way.

You know, it was Herodotus who first suggested the idea of examining all ideas both when sober and when drunk to see if they were good.

Oh, really? It helps because we— the more ways you can look at a topic, the perhaps the more you'll understand it, to be honest. And, but I think the main thing is ego. The main thing is the ego bias. We don't want to be wrong. And certainly if we've taken a position, it's really hard for us to accept that we screwed up.

Given that you didn't come from a fancy background, who first noticed your talent and how?

It was kind of a shock when I was in elementary school. This will tell you a certain amount about me. There's an exam that they, they sit, that you can sit for back in those days called the 11+, which was an IQ test essentially. And I was just a kid in elementary school and I was about to graduate and go to high school and, and they set this test and then my head teacher brought my parents in and I thought I was in trouble and it turned out I had like the highest score in the county or something. And that was when I was told I was very smart. I mean, I, I wasn't really aware of it until then. And then I got sent to this super magnet school, uh, which was wonderful. And for people from all backgrounds who just were over a certain level of IQ, a kind of Stuyvesant, a kind of magnet school. And then within the first month, they graded everyone on all the topics and put the list of 1 to 30 in the class on the wall, and I was number 1, which was another huge shock to me. So that's how I found out. I was not really aware I was that bright, but the system found me. And this is why I'm a pretty passionate defender of SATs and IQ tests in general, to find kids who otherwise would be missed, especially kids from poor backgrounds who have native ability but haven't had a chance to show that and whose parents could not have afforded— my parents could not afford to send me to any school where you'd have to pay. So that was how it happened.

Now, as an undergraduate, you knew and were friends with Niall Ferguson, N-I-A-L-L, that Niall. What was he like back then?

Pretty much the same. We were a little wilder, to be honest. We were a little brattier and a little more interested in just comedy. We published a little ramshackle magazine that poked fun at the toffs, at the Etonians. We both sort of thought of ourselves a little bit as what we call grammar school boys who weren't part of the elite, but we got in because of our brains. And so we were a little contemptuous of one of our peers, for example, Boris Johnson, who was also there at the same time. I mean, this is what happens in England. It's a very close, it's a very small elite in a way. And the other, I mean, I also went to high school. Sat next to Keir Starmer for 6 years, who's now the leader of the opposition. So it's amazing in my own education, just by chance, became friends with the leader, current leader of the opposition, and the prime minister.

Given that you knew him then, what insight do you have into the Boris Johnson administration that the rest of us would not?

That he's a charmer and a liar and hilarious.

On purpose hilarious.

Yes, that this is— he was the— he was an Etonian who showed up. A lot of the Etonians, people came from Eton, the highest sort of fancy school in Britain. And unlike the other Etonians who came to Oxford and decided, well, we've got to downplay this, we've got to be cred, we've got to wear like regular clothes and like, and alter our accent. No, Boris came and said, instead of fighting it, I'm going to just turn into a caricature of an upper-class twit, you know, if you've ever seen the Monty Python sketch of the— one of those. And but did so with such a sort of knowing irony that we all kind of got the joke. So it's the same act that he's doing now. And I, for one, at the time at Oxford, because we were both in the Oxford Union together, which was the debating society where you got elected, whatever. And so I was elected president in my second year, and he had a hard time But I was very much on his side because I just thought he was a talent. And I found him funny and I could forgive him for anything, really. And I think, I think that's why maybe having known that side of Boris and not being intimately aware as my peers in England were of all his shenanigans, of all his lies, of all his corners cut, of all the betrayals that he committed, I didn't see any of that and experience it. When I went back to England and talked to all my peers about him, they were so full of bitterness that they had begun I think, to forget his basic charm and that power. And I saw that at Oxford. It's the same thing now, and it's why he's a very successful politician.

More generally, what is it that intelligent, educated Americans get wrong about British politics?

They're wrong to think that it's somehow a more elevated discourse. It can be at times, but it's just as raucous as here. I think Brexit has been terribly misunderstood by Americans because they conflated it for understandable reasons with Trump, and they conflated Boris Johnson with Trump, and simply not the case. If you had had a less crazy, I mean, Boris is not crazy at all. He's a very smart person, and he's also not like Trump, a complete outsider. He's the insider's insider, editor of The Spectator, you know, Oxford, Eton, Mayor of London. These are not outsider positions and therefore dismiss it and don't really understand it. In fact, I think the Tories have developed a very canny strategy to represent the, the voices and feelings of those who feel they're left behind without abandoning an important segment of the elite. And that's the role of the Tory Party historically, has been to co-opt populism for elitism, as it were, to prevent revolution by co-opting. And I think what Boris has done, in fact, and one of the things you'll notice in Britain is that the parties, the far-right parties that were kind of gaining strength have collapsed. And the Tories basically own the entire right-of-center vote, whereas the left is split between Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party and the Greens in a way that gives Boris a constant advantage. And that, I think, is not very well understood.

Do you think the United Kingdom will split up in the next few decades as we know it?

Probably. I mean, I wrote a piece like 20 years ago. I read it when I was going through the book, reading things to see if I would include it in the book, where I basically predicted that I can't see Scotland being part of the UK past another 20 years, and that was about 20 years ago.

But don't they want to leave and keep the pound and the Queen and everything else? Yeah, and just, you know, say buzz off to the English. Where can they go really? If you look at their trade, language—

Every time they've come up to this decision, it looks like they're going to pass it and they always pull back because in fact the arguments for Scottish independence are incredibly weak. First of all, the EU would not recognize it. The EU is not going to have Scotland as an independent state because they'd have to deal with Catalonia and other elements in Europe, which the Spanish, for example, would veto. So I don't think they have a chance to get back in the EU, even though they have this old, you know, the Scots, you go back to the 16th and 17th centuries, the Scots were always allied with the Europeans against the English, the French primarily against the English. But so maybe, I don't know, I do think that Northern Ireland has been effectively turned into non-UK by the trade barrier in the Irish Sea, which Boris negotiated. And so I think that Northern Ireland has definitely taken a step away from being fully in the union the way that Scotland and Wales are.

Whether or not you agree with it, but what is the most convincing version of British pessimism? Is it John Gray? Is it Roger Scruton? Is it FitzJames Stephens? Someone else? Is it you? Who, who or what is it? Because you're mostly optimistic, but which, who's the pessimist?

Yeah, I'm not quite as dark.

Where you're tempted to cross over to the dark side?

Maybe someone like Peter Hitchens or Douglas Murray who have a really bleak understanding of what's happening in Europe with the Muslim population and also a sense that traditional classical liberalism in Britain is really under siege. Sorry, that's a, that's a, that's a ferry boat blasting.

Um, don't worry, we've had trains cross through our episodes, everything.

Yeah. Um, these are good questions, Tyler. So I think that's what I would say to that.

But the Muslim immigration to Britain seems to have gone acceptably well, right?

I think that there are parts, I think, of England, northern England particularly, which have had some issues with not full integration. I mean, really some separate, like separatist entities. But yeah, Bradford, I think, would be one of them, and in which there have been some really ugly grooming, child grooming practices, and ways in which the Muslim community in those areas, which came from very rural, kind of backward areas of Pakistan, and they're not— weren't quite ready for modern liberal democracy. And there's some element in which that works. But in general, when I go to England, I do think that it's pretty successful multiracially. But then I think America is too, because I have a slightly lower expectation, I think, of human nature than most people do. But in general, the English and the Americans pretty easygoing about this. You go to London and it's pretty easygoing. What they were responding to, I think, and I— is the speed of change in which— I mean, one of the saddest things my brother ever said to me when I was over there a few years ago was talking about London, and he said to me, well, you know, it's not our capital city anymore, is it? And it really struck me that that he felt that London was sort of a different country now, that it was an internationalist, global kind of playground as opposed to England's and Britain's capital city. And when you look at the demographics, you see that 40% of Londoners were not born in the United Kingdom. Now in New York, fine, that's always been the case. It's a big immigration entrepôt. But This never happened to England before. And so I think, and if you go to London, you real— and I recently, it's very hard to hear an English accent or an English person in any service industry. I mean, it's quite remarkable. Of course, in some ways that's a huge advertisement for London. It's the place where every other European wants to go live. It's a place where people from all over the world want to live, and it's a fantastic city. But from the perspective of the coherence of England, I think it happened a little too fast and a little, and it was a little too much. And that's the adjustment.

Why is there so much residual British hatred of Margaret Thatcher? So to call her Maggie the Milk Snatcher, you'll still hear that. Like, who cares? How long ago was that? The milk, whatever. What is it about her that so set off her enemies?

It's funny, cause I was, I was a kid. I was used to fight with Starmer all the time about Thatcher in the '70s, and the passions were intense. I think the thing is that she changed Britain and she did it without a great deal of emollients, as it were. She just did it. And she did it in a way that profoundly shifted Britain from a socialistic to a much more capitalistic country. And from what I felt was an incredibly stultified class-based country to a much more entrepreneurial and dynamic country. And in the process, of course, consigned large amounts of what was decrepit and stultified and moribund in Britain essentially over. And that included, for example, like the great coal fields of the north, which were draining the public treasury and forcing people to go down into mines. And it was absurd from my point of view, but there was— the people really hated her. I know, I just loved her. And And she became this sort of bête noire. I mean, remember she was, because she was such a formidable figure, reelected 3 times, transformed the country, a woman, a Tory, all these things just, just were too much for some people to even begin to absorb. I have a piece in the book called Thatcher, Liberator. They didn't even see her extraordinary pioneering work as a, as a woman leader, as a woman who, who had a, was a professional woman who earned a living as a chemist. And a lawyer, and, and who took on the Tory Party. I mean, I think it's an amazing story myself, and I think she was more right than wrong about almost everything, um, with a few obvious errors. But I don't, I don't get it either. I still— my peers in England will still get so upset about her, and she's been dead. I don't get it.

What do you think are the main disadvantages women face in politics And are any of those reflected in views on Thatcher? Yeah, well, isn't there less emotional space that women are allowed to inhabit? Just like Barack Obama knew he could not get away with being very angry very often, if at all, right?

Right.

So what are those constraints for women?

You would think the constraint would be you can't yell, you can't harangue, you can't be aggressive in debate without backlash. But she was all of the above. I mean, she was, she did not make any concessions to her femininity in terms of being a politician. And the House of Commons itself, just the format of House of Commons is so gladiatorial. It's so much a theater that politics in Britain has to have this kind of slightly parliamentary theatrical element to it. And I think politics has often had that kind of dramatic theatrical element to it. And that doesn't seem to come as naturally to many women as it does to many men. And that is a problem for women's access, even though they've made huge strides in Britain. We already had two female prime ministers, for example, as opposed to the United States. But one thing's interesting also, that Thatcher and, for example, Theresa May, and also Angela Merkel, they were not understood within their own politics in the way that Hillary Clinton was understood within American politics. It's just not that big a gendered gap. In fact, if you look at the voting numbers, you find that there is almost no gender gap between Labour and the Tories in Britain. It's a very American phenomenon, this idea that a woman in politics is somehow the symbol of feminism and of the breaking the glass ceiling and all of that. It's just not taken as seriously in Europe as it is here.

Now, in the middle of all these conversations, we have a segment, Overrated vs. Underrated.

Okay.

I toss out a name, a place, an idea. You tell me if you think it's overrated or underrated. Are you ready?

Awesome. Yes, I'm ready. Go ahead.

Elton John, overrated or underrated?

Oh, just trying to figure that out. Um, I think he's rated pretty accurately, to be honest. I don't think either— I mean, I think he's, he's a great genius. He's, you know, without Bernie Taupin— yeah, okay, overrated without Bernie. Those lyrics are hard to beat.

David Bowie, overrated or underrated?

Underrated. Underrated. He was so smart. This man had such a, a vast sort of erudition insight. I mean, I don't know whether he was seeing that remark he made about the future of the internet. He was smarter about what was coming than almost anybody else. And the creativity of this guy. I mean, we have all these lame non-binary bullshit today, and here was a man in the '70s. Utterly exploding differences between men and women, being androgynous, being— while being incredibly heterosexual. Just a fantastic individual. That's why my dog is called Bowie, after him.

Oh, great.

Charles Dickens, I think, rated correctly.

What's your favorite book by him?

By him? I think David Copperfield.

The state of Utah, over or underrated?

Underrated.

Why?

Have you looked at the statistics there? They're incredible. I mean, here's, here's a tribute to Mormonism. The one of the— if one of the great crises affecting America is this atomization, this, this lack of meaning, this lack of community, then the Mormons have shown you don't have to do that. Now, I've also experienced the other side of that because I had a lot of time there with many of the gay groups there back in the '90s. But again, in Utah, they came to this wonderful Utah compromise between the Mormon Church and the gay rights groups, which really allowed both of them space to breathe. Romney, I would dearly love that guy to be president if we had a Republican. Definitely underrated.

Theresa May, over or underrated?

Underrated because she was given a basically impossible task. And she did as well, I think, as anybody could have. And it was necessary, I think, to actually spell out how Brexit would take place, which required a certain process of the country and the country's elites running out of excuses to do it. And that was always gonna take time. And she took the brunt of it. And I think she's underrated the way that John Major, for example, is underrated as Prime Minister. Monster.

The musical group Queen.

Underrated. I mean, how could you, how could you overrate Queen? I mean, it's amazing. Freddie Mercury as a, as a figure is another gay icon to me, who I think is, you know, I mean, I, a lot of people saw that, that movie Bohemian Rhapsody, but the songs that man wrote, I mean, you, we still sing them, we still hear them, they're still part of our culture. And again, Another incredibly original gay man. Just for a gay man to conquer rock and roll with no real posturing about it. A lot of the stuff that we celebrate to the first person to do it, people did it before under much harder circumstances and didn't sit around asking to get a gold medal for it. And he came from a very conservative background. And yet he lived his life. And if all those football fans and who chant his songs realize they're chanting this super gay man, I find fantastic. I love that mishmash. I hate the separatism. I love when gay stuff is embraced by straight people and vice versa. I just, I love the possibility of cultural mixture and energy that comes from that.

What's your favorite movie?

Airplane!

Why?

I watch it every year because it's just so funny and stupid. And, and as a tonic, if you're weighed down by the world, especially if you're weighed down by wokeness or the kind of incredibly censorious attitude that we have, it's just so great to sit down and watch that every now and again and see, see what they got away with. And just the sight gags. I'm a big fan of sight gags. And of slapstick. And so Airplane, I mean, not saying it's the greatest movie of all time or anything, I'm just saying I'm particularly fond— when I think of movies I'm particularly fond of, the other one I would say that comes to mind, if I'm being totally serious, is this movie called, um, Into Great Silence, which is a Philip Groening documentary on the monastery of Chartreuse, the silent order, and which has never accepted any outsider in its entire history since the Middle Ages. And he gets in and just films their life, their chanting, their work, the way they garden, the way they pray. And this lasts for 3 hours and there are no words in it until the last 20 minutes, and you are riveted throughout. As an expression of spirituality, it's an extraordinary film.

Who's the most interesting and underrated feminist thinker?

I still like Germaine Greer, to be honest with you. I just like her. Candor, her rigor, her energy, and her balls, if I'm allowed to say that. I'm not really allowed to say that, but her— we won't cut it out now, right? We could talk about a lady's balls now the way we couldn't before. But yeah, no, I, I, I'm a big fan of hers, still a fan of hers. She did some tough stuff, and she's now actually also taking some tough stance, which I appreciate and approve of.

Now you often have described yourself as an Oakeshottian, right, Michael Oakeshott?

Mm-hmm.

How would you approach political issues where it seems you have to choose something ideological and there's not an obvious way to do experimentation? So take, say, the Mexican-American War from the 1840s. How do you think about that? Are you glad it happened? Was it a big mistake? Is the Oakeshottian framework adequate to handle that?

I'm not— I don't know enough about the Mexican-American War.

But you know, we took the land and didn't give it back, right? You know it didn't belong to us, and you know it was a lot of land. I'm not sure you need to know the details of—

No, but I, but, but okay. I think as a itself would not fit an Oakeshottian understanding of what politics should do. Seizing land is not what Oakeshott's conservatism would be about, but Oakeshott's conservatism is very European and not as easily applicable to the United States in its formative periods. But sometimes it does seem to me that taking a bold ideological position on a public issue in which it is not so easy to simply compromise or cut in two or finesse is necessary. What Oakeshott would say is the key thing is, is such an act of radicalism actually a form of balancing. So for example, you could make an argument that Thatcher, for example, came in with a very radical ideological agenda of shrinking the state, lowering taxes, cutting spending, et cetera, which was ideological. So why does a Tory support it? Because the country had so gravitated towards an idea of socialism that in fact that kind of ideology was necessary pragmatically. To return Britain to its center, as it were. So sometimes radicalism is a necessary part of moderation. And how do you determine which incident or which moment in history or which decision is that decision? The conservative and Oakeshott would say you can't. That, that is where you see to what we might call prudence, prudential judgment, which is where we rely upon the individual politician the individual statesperson, to have the judgment necessary to make the right call. And it will not be prescribed in advance, it will be hard to determine retroactively, but in the moment, a person able to make those kind of prudential, practical decisions is the person we should follow. And the goal is to keep the society on an even keel, not to disrupt it too much, even though sometimes it takes radicalism to keep it on an even keel.

At the state level, do we have Okshadian legislators today in America?

Well, fewer and fewer because of the, the way in which the gerrymandering particularly has made it more important for incumbents to worry about primary opponents than their general election opponents. But I do think, and I'll echo David Brooks here, that there is more of it than you might imagine, that there are practical things that need to be done. Things that need to be rearranged as the society changes and moves. And there are people in politics capable of doing that, who have done that. And certainly at a state level, that's increasingly the case. There are no, just complicated, difficult things that require administrative skill and political judgment. And I think that kind of political judgment, which is not to be too driven by ideology in all things, but to allow the The possibility of a prudential, pragmatic adjustment is what Oakeshottian politics is at some point about.

Do you think the American Southeast will walk away from the pandemic as the least traumatized or most traumatized part of the country?

It could be the most. I mean, I think the experience of having had an opportunity to avoid a catastrophe and then walking right into it.

Is potentially much more emotionally and psychologically traumatizing than just having something happen to you that you had no warning for and that you couldn't have prepared for, but which, which knocked you out the way New Yorkers, I think, were traumatized by 9/11, or indeed the first wave of COVID But life, say, in Miami or Nashville, it seems to have returned to normal much more quickly than in San Francisco, and people have a more casual attitude about it that seems to be bad from the point of view of casualties, but there's lower unemployment, more rapid bounce back.

I see that too. My worry is that we're— the Delta variant means that it's also going to mean a lot of death in the next month or two, more, much more death than might otherwise be the case, and that we'll have to wait and see how that affects this understanding. In general, as you know, I'm in favor of getting on with life and getting back to normal as quickly as possible. And I say that as someone who's particularly vulnerable to COVID, but I've looked at the risks, got my vaccination, and I'm going to live my life with some reasonable precautions. And so I kind of appreciate where they're coming from, but I seriously, Tyler, I don't understand why you wouldn't take a prudential measure to save your own life when it's available to you for free. It doesn't quite— I don't quite— maybe that I'm so used to having my body medicalized. That having another needle stuck in me feels so routine at this point that I can't understand the idea of people who really aren't part of a medical system having to subject themselves to it for the first time on the basis of a potential illness. We'll see, won't we? I mean, my hope is, and it might be the case, you know, that Delta's going to blow itself out quite quickly as it seems to be happening in Britain right now, so they may not. But I do think there's a chance that they're gonna suffer terribly and suffer on top of that the sense that they could have avoided it, which makes you doubly traumatized.

Now you've supported both Obama and President Biden on the grounds that they would help us get past the culture war. It seems in a lot of ways culture war's gotten worse. What's your view now? Is it, it would have been even worse yet without those figures? Or maybe Obama made it worse in ways I hadn't seen at the time? Or Give us your current model.

You realize, I think, that the individual president can't unravel these forces that have been propelling us now for since the 1960s, really. That was the sort of thesis of the Obama support was that he could get us past this. He's the first non-boomer or post-boomer to really be able to slice through pragmatically these, this, this deep right, left, somewhere, nowhere, heartland, coasts divide. And so with Obama, again, I look at it and I'm like, I've really tried in my conscience to see, did he really inflame racial relations or the culture war in ways? And I honestly don't think he did. I think he tried quite hard not to, which is in stark contrast, of course, to Trump. And I think Biden is more at fault than Obama, even though Obama was much more ferociously opposed because of his complete embrace of critical race theory and the diversity, equity, inclusion agenda across the government and elsewhere. Whereas Obama was really very hostile to those things and resisted those things. But I'm sobered up by the fact that I never fully understood how Obama was as unpopular as he was in many parts of the country. And I honestly can see some aspects of his personality could rub people the wrong way, but his core decency always seemed to me quite self-evident. And I have to conceive it simply that Americans, I always believed Americans would be willing to elect a black president. I underestimated how willing they would be to be governed by one. And so some deep racial stuff I had underestimated came to the surface.

If we look at the world as a whole and recognize there's some globalized element to culture, and just ask the simple question: the world as a whole, should it be more woke or less woke? Which would you prefer?

As a whole?

Well, there's Pakistan, right? There's how gay people are treated.

And right, well, no, but woke does not mean socially advanced or progressive. It doesn't. It means it has a very clear view that the West is essentially a construction of— has been a construction of oppression rather than liberation.

But it's a number of things. Let's take like the 200 most woke people in San Francisco and give them more influence, like their views have more influence all around the world. Does that make for a better world or a worse world? Doesn't it make for a better world?

I think it, I think it probably does if you, if you're considering Saudi Arabia.

So you belong to the faction of—

uh, Tyler, uh, I, I belong definitely to the faction of people who want to see minorities and people who are, have been previously marginalized in society being given the full opportunities to become absolutely fine, full contributing members to our society. You can do that through a liberal system. In fact, I think a liberal system is the best way to do that, the least divisive, and the more psychologically productive. But so in that, if I could find a way to make the world more respectful of those ideas, I would. But wokeness is not about that. It is about the notion that the world is defined by oppression and that it's not just defined by oppression but defined by white oppression. And I think if you took the lessons of the woke in terms of the inherent conflict between white and non-white, the non-white world, we're talking about a major global war, a major non-zero-sum global conflict, which the way that it would be a non— it would be a zero-sum conflict in the United States if they really had their had their brothers. And so no, I'm not woke, not globally, but I do believe that it has a positive marginal product.

It may not be your preferred ideology.

Maybe, maybe it has a social, marginally social product, but I, I do prefer societies where women have equality and choice in their lives. I do believe in societies where gay people aren't murdered and persecuted, where antisemitism isn't. I mean, all those things, of course, I'm a liberal. I believe those things. I just think the means by which you get there Matters.

Why has wokeness done so well, at least along our coasts, in passing a kind of market test in many of our most productive companies? Now, some of it's the government, governmental support, but clearly it goes far beyond that, right? How has that happened? What's gone wrong in the market, might one ask?

Well, it's less the market than the elite market, because it's the elites that have made these decisions.

It's a market.

This isn't coming from a a wellspring of, of, of American suburbanites demanding they go through struggle sessions on their complicity in white supremacy. That is not— that it hasn't bubbled up from below. Here's why I think, because the elites kind of have a Martin Luther King Jr. envy. Every generation wants to have that moral quality, that sense that they are shifting the arc of history in a better way, even though we've generally done about as much as we possibly can to do that in terms of within the possibilities of a liberal system. So there's that— the need to feel worthy and the need to feel that you're doing things. It's also much more conducive to human nature to see people in terms of groups rather than individuals. It's just much more— it's much more comfortable for people to do that. We are essentially tribal. And so what wokeness appeals to, in the way that the far right also appeals, it appeals to tribalism. And tribalism in its crudest sense of being able to identify people instantly as a member of your tribe or another tribe. That is how humans have always lived. So of course it's, it's likely to be more successful when you combine it with the sense of moral righteousness as well. To tell people you can be tribalist and moral at the same time is an incredibly attractive way of life. To be able to see a white male and know instantly that person is part of the problem before you even talk to them is hugely rewarding for a human— the human psyche. Always has been, always will be. Liberalism, the achievement of seeing the individual independently of his or her group, is hard. It's counterintuitive. And so it's always on the defensive in many ways. And whether it's a sort of tribal right-wing racism or whether it's a tribal left-wing neo-racism, it's— they both come more naturally to humans than the liberal discipline.

Last question. You said toward the beginning you wanted to travel more. Let's say you had 2 free weeks, all expenses paid, no responsibilities, No COVID restrictions. Where would you go and why?

I would go to Rome, which I've never fully really discovered and never really spent that much time in. I would probably go to Rio. I don't understand South America very well, and there's something about that city that really compels me. And I would go to Ireland because it's also an island where my whole, most of my family comes from. And I've never really spent time in the west of Ireland where my ancestors came. And, you know, my brother went around there recently and he said, you know, it's funny, I go into these little town in Cork and they all look like us. It was sort of, there was this sense of, I'd like to get in touch with my ancestral roots by glowering at the grim Atlantic Ocean and the steady rain and the bleak sky and get in touch with their grit and their resilience. That's, that's where I'd like to go, those places. How's that?

Andrew Sullivan, thank you very much. And again, Andrew's new book, the definitive statement of Andrew Sullivan. It is called Out on a Limb: Selected Writing, 1989 to 2021.

Tyler, you lived up to your reputation. Those are fantastic questions delivered with merciless speed and energy. I'm so grateful. Thank you. I'm afraid I didn't do as well as I hoped to, but nonetheless, thank you for having Oh, great dialogue.

Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. And if you like this podcast, please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review. This helps other people find the show.